Last week, I read a Newsweek item about the millions of Americans who stand ready to take up arms against the duly elected Biden Administration, and the article opened with a real doozy:
Mike "Wompus" Nieznany is a 73-year-old Vietnam veteran who walks with a cane from the combat wounds he received during his service. That disability doesn't keep Nieznany from making a living selling custom motorcycle luggage racks from his home in Gainesville, Georgia. Neither will it slow him down when it's time to visit Washington, D.C.—heavily armed and ready to do his part in overthrowing the U.S. government.
Walks with a cane due to injuries he received fifty-odd years ago... this is a guy who wouldn't last a week during an insurgency, even if he didn't face enemy fire. Among the arrestees who's ages are known, the average age is forty-one, with two-thirds of arrestees being over thirty-five. At least one of the rioters died of a heart attack, though sadly, tales of him repeatedly shocking himself in the balls with a taser seem to be untrue. Many of these guys would croak without statins or insulin, which might be in short supply during a shooting war. As horrific as 1/6 was, it was also suffused with a sad Divorced Dad energy, an uprising of deadbeats. Notably, the two insurgents who died as a result of violence were women. So much for MAGA chivalry!
But Big-B, you might ask, what about the guns that right-wingers possess? As far as that goes, just because they own guns doesn't mean that they are competent in their use. The most infamous current militia leader shot his own eye out, like a kid in a comedy film. Congresscreep and violent fantasist Madison Cawthorn, besides being mobility-challenged, can't hit the broad side of a barn, and has terrible gun safety practices, even shooting while a friend was downrange, and shooting a pristine target point-blank from over the firing line. In a real shooting war, these idiots would end up fragging each other.
One mantra that has been going through my head for the past four years is a riff on Marx: historical entities and facts repeat themselves, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, adding that a third time, they repeat themselves as tragedy cum farce, or maybe farcical tragedy. The people want an insurrection, but can't even get an erection without pills... instead of a Whiskey Rebellion, they'd have to settle for a Cialis Rebellion.
9 comments:
I've been saying for years: All this talk of another 'civil war' doesn't have me trembling at the thought of waves of mobility scooters cresting the horizon.
These all talk ass hats may have guns, but they're incapable of putting together more than a battalion or two of men that could run up a flight of stairs without oxygen bottles. Much less command and control systems, supply lines and a shift to industrial war footing, etc. needed for a proper war. A few ham fisted terrorist attacks--although still dangerous, but in very small and not even close to war level casualty numbers--is the best they'll manage. Not good, but not a true war by any stretch of the imagination.
Well, I appreciate this viewpoint!
We have a lot of these guys in our county; they've been overt since the Posse Comitatus days. Some of what you say has occurred to me before, but is soon overridden when I see the hatred on their faces, or read it in their remarks. I guess I equate that to them running on adrenaline, but I'm going to remember what you wrote here the next time I see a local being buttsy, online or in public. Thanks!
There are more guns than people in the US.
75% of Americans, however,
do not own EVEN one gun.
Of the 25% who do own guns,
JUST 3% OWN HALF OF ALL GUNS.
EXTRA CREDIT:
Gee, do you think that 3% is
compensating for something?
Sure, the militia movement guys are mostly all talk. Even as they weeded out the obvious drags on their performance, even militias that had slimmed down would not be terribly effective until and unless they got a whole lot of on-the-job training in squad tactics on actual battlefields. A lot of them would be killed, and it would take a good while before they achieved individual competence, much less were able to field units with competence across all the individual skills needed to achieve that organizational competence.
But the militias are not at all likely to decide who would win the civil war these folks seem eager to start. In 1860 the US Army was a corporal's guard, heavily outnumbered and not even possessing a clear qualitative advantage over many state militias even as these militias existed in peacetime, much less as they were augmented in anticipation of the coming war. The Civil War really was in that military sense a War Between the States, however much that name for it was devised to misdirect on its political nature. Both sides fought almost entirely with state militias called to Federal or Confederate service, with the US Army playing a minor role.
In 2022 we have huge outsized active duty military, and no clear state militias at all. DeSantis wants to create an actual state militia, something he commands, precisely because state NG units are pretty much federal assets.
A civil war that starts in 2022 is going to be decided quickly by the current active duty military. They will brush aside, easily, any amateur militia, no matter how good a job such might have done at weeding out folks in mobility chairs while still having impressive numbers in their rosters.
The only way we get a civil war should we allow our politics to slide into open violence by organized groups of armed men and women, is if the active and NG/Reserve military fragments and breaks pretty close to even. If they stay at all together, it will be a coup and not a war.
Of course this is a matter of very high order judgment, but I suspect that they will have a strong tendency to stay together in such a crisis, because of the effect of institutional loyalty trumping political loyalty. If they absolutely have no choice but to leave their barracks, whichever political side currently holds the presidency will have a leg up on which side they choose to back, but the period between a contested presidential election and the Inauguration would make that allegiance unclear. Aside from that, I also suspect that the sizable minority of them who do have a political loyalty favor the Rs more strongly and in greater number than the faction who might favor the Ds. Those in the military who lack strong political loyalties would probably, if forced by a threatened fracture to choose a side, throw in with the R faction to keep the military as together as possible.
The other possibility is that they would avoid any political allegiance and just set up military rule. That may be the option that the cautious institutionalists at the top would see as the least incautious should the political parties continue to forfeit the duty of govt to confront and control insurrection. Let the Ds continue to fail to address 1/6 and the ongoing Trump Really Won movement behind it, and the military might foresee inevitable repeated attempts at insurrection, until finally the Rs succeed. Let these radical Rs seize power by force and fraud, and they face a future in which these mobility chair warriors are placed in charge of the military, because these militias will be more reliably loyal to this new regime than the active duty military. Why not just give up on civilian rule when the civilians seem to have done that already?
Echoing and amplifying on Glen the key factor is less the external militas and more what both the army and the police do. As a Jew, I've long been concerned about the Dominionist influence on the Air Force, the Air Force academy in particular. But of more practical concern is a widespread effort by white supremacists of various flavors to infiltrate local police (and also the army). If, as Glen suggest above, the military has to decide which way to jump, if there is a general trend of local police forces supporting the white supremacist insurrection that may have a more outsized influence than the average person might think.
" In a real shooting war, these idiots would end up fragging each other."
Heck I'd put money on them fragging themselves...
"Wompus" Nieznany is an old fool. He suffered and got wounded badly in the Vietnam War. He survived and was able to drag himself back to his hometown. Everything had changed and he got no help from anyone. He wasn't the same old Wompus anymore.
Who knows why? They put a flag on a boy and sent him off to fight for America. He came home as damaged goods.
The people were not able to understand this.
But! But... the elite Republicans are more than willing to sacrifice their conservatives pawns to foment violent political change. They're doing it with their Antivaxx Covid stances, as Ron DeathSantis is vaccinated and will overcome hs bout. However, with the exception of the Boebert's and Gaetz's most GOP probably would like to win via subversion of voting as opposed to actually picking up arms themselves.
Like I keep saying, these asshats may have a lot of guns, but they can only shoot one at a time. And having spent a lot of time at the range among these twits, they can't shoot well or effectively. They think nothing of pouring a thousand rounds downrange as fast as their itchy fingers can pull the triggers on their heavily tricked out AR's and AK's (and burning out their barrels and receivers in the process.)
Their knowledge of tactics they've pulled out of the movies and their asses. And the majority of them would brown their shorts at the first sounds of incoming ripping past their ears.
And lastly, they routinely believe that we liberals don't serve in the military or carry and use guns. And I'm not inclined to disabuse them of that fallacy, until we need to. More the fools they.
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